In November I told you about a proposed law in the state of New York which would prohibit police and prosecutors from using condoms as “evidence of prostitution”. Well, apparently the vote on it must be getting close because the Sex Workers Project recently released this public service announcement encouraging people to contact their representatives to urge their support for the measure. As I wrote in the previous column, this is important even to those of us who don’t live in New York because if it passes there, “health advocacy groups will no doubt try it in other civil-rights-friendly legislatures and even cops in other states may abandon the procedure for fear that prostitutes’ defense attorneys may use the proven legal arguments which established those laws in challenges elsewhere.”

Here’s another example of others (in this case, porn again) having to deal with the same kind of ridiculous attacks, bogus statistics and character assassination as we whores have to; it was published in Huffington Post on February 18th:

No conclusive data exists on the harm pornography does directly to the men (or women) who view it, or to the partners of men (or women) who view it. It seems unlikely that such data ever will come to be. It’s been four decades since the…[President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography] found no connection between violent behavior and consumption of pornography, but then-president Richard Nixon — much like today’s radical feminists — summarily rejected that conclusion because it didn’t fit his personal ideology. After 40 years promoting a movement devoid of scientific evidence, anti-porn activists are becoming increasingly desperate for ways to persuade the unconvinced public that sex on film is our greatest cultural threat. Consequently, their arguments are increasingly ludicrous. The most recent example is courtesy of Gail Dines and her horror over young ladies’ pubic grooming habits.

In a piece for The Guardian…Dines…claim[s] that (presumably straight) young women who don’t want to have sex simply don’t shave…know[ing] their porn-accustomed male dates will be so horrified by pubic hair that consenting to get naked…is…out of the question…such a convoluted tale renders college-attending young women into pitiful, self-hating shells unable to defend themselves from the second-hand tyranny of the dominant porn aesthetic…

This is Gail Dines. Any guesses why she hates porn?

…Is this what feminism looks like, the sober assertion that when women old enough to legally marry, drive and vote decide that “saying no is too difficult,” our best response is to outlaw sex on film?…Anti-porn activists do not want a more inclusive, egalitarian, respectful sex industry. They want no sex industry at all, and they’ll say whatever they think will bring about such an outcome. To claim that eliminating sexually explicit material makes young women more comfortable with their bodies and more empowered to make decisions about their sexual lives is insultingly facile. But as sex educators have pointed out, Dines’s goal is…to create moral panic…but in an age when female adult performers have their own Twitter feeds, blogs and memoirs to affirm their lucidity and free will, it’s much harder to press the old “all women in porn are abused victims!” lie that dominated discourse in the 1980s…

…In [Gail Dines’] world, women are not human beings capable of asserting their own preferences or declining to conform to the preferences of others. They are completely cowed by men and they only derive confidence from conforming to the most stringent of male requirements. I have a hard time believing many porn films are more misogynistic than that grotesque disavowal of female intelligence, capability and self-respect. And I have a hard time trusting someone who thinks so little of women with making decisions about what policies are best for furthering women’s development.

Change a few words and names, and it’s about anti-prostitution fanatics; the last paragraph barely needs to be changed at all.

It looks as though CNN is still channeling the spirit of William Randolph Hearst; the only way I can see for them to sink any lower would be to pay for their own Schapiro Group “study” or hire actresses to portray “rescued sex slaves” for the cameras.

Most of you probably read Pete Kotz’s article about the Super Bowl hooker invasion myth for which Yours Truly was interviewed (and if you haven’t, why not?) Well, his follow-up appeared Monday night and though I’m not mentioned in it, it’s every bit as entertaining as the first and well worth your time and commentary!

In the referenced column I pointed out that, while trafficking hysterics don’t do a damned thing for real sex slaves, their propaganda inspires creeps and criminals. And as I recently discovered on this Russian news website, it also makes us look pretty bad internationally (especially in countries whose journalists were conditioned for decades not to question their sources). Good going, trafficking fanatics! Let’s see how much more damage you can do before you’re swept into the dustbin of history along with all the previous witch hunts.

17 Responses

Maggie, I don’t know if you’ve ever watched Penn and Teller’s TV show (they did a great one on prostitution). They had Gail Dines as their guest on their porn episode and she’s even crazier than you read above. She was claiming (or trying to) that the shaved asthetic in porn is going to make men sexually attracted to their pre-pubescent daughters. Or something. It was hard to tell.

She also used the latest tactic — the “I’m on your side” line that is the last desperate gambit of a defeated ideology: the idea that porn makes men unable to have normal sexual relationships. As if men (and women) never had unrealistic expectations about sex before!

We don’t have outside TV, and even when we did we didn’t get Showtime. But I did see an episode of it (the one about genetically engineered foods) while we were on a trip somewhere. Even if I hadn’t ever seen it, though, it would still be on my Amazon Wish List because I think Penn and Teller are among the coolest of human beings. :-)

Well, Maggie, beautiful women come in all shapes and sizes, so I don’t want to put Dines down for being fat. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing quite a few fat women in my life who were beautiful and had great personalities.

Exactly so. There are a lot of BBW escorts who are very popular, but they care about their appearances, carry themselves well, dress nicely, appeal to men who like that body type and make up for figure flaws with personality. Gail Dines does none of the above, which is clearly why she’s intimidated by other women who are comfortable enough with their sexualities to appear in porn. :-(

You know that moment when you read something, and then immediately have to re-read it because you cannot believe it is true? That happened to me when I read that the levels of slavery and people trafficking today are greater than at any point in history.

Did you notice that the author of that article, despite being a “Executive Vice President and Managing Director of CNN International”, writes at about a sixth-grade level? The post is full of grammatical errors, and his concluding paragraph is a sentence fragment! English teacher Maggie’s grade for Tony Maddox: F :-(

I noticed, but I don’t usually criticize such things because I’m not exactly Mr. Grammar myself. Then again, I don’t have al the resources of a major cable network to check my stuff before I put it out there for the world to see. Yes, I did spell “monotremes” two different ways on the same page (and that was before she laid a virtual egg), but as soon as a reader caught it, I fixed it.

The nearly all-woman group (except for one token man – probably the janitor in the APA offices) provided some documentation for their claims and also acknowledged the importance of comprehensive sex education and sex-positive cultural views.

But isn’t the fundamental problem an economic one? If you have ideal beauty you get more in exchange for sharing it, and if your body isn’t close to the current cultural ideal you can expect to get less. That’s not clinical depression, it’s a fact of economic life that leads to normal sadness or disappointment.

What the APA psycho-feminists are really advocating is propaganda to silence open expression of sincere preferences, and instead promote a politically correct idea of “acceptable beauty” that would be immune to public criticism – not to mention drumming up business for psychotherapists from all the not so ideally beautiful women out there.

The whole concept of “idealized feminine beauty” causing depression is a load of crap. What next, neomarxist masculinists demanding redistribution of wealth so poor men won’t get depressed over rich men they see on TV? Any society which coddles its children to the point of trying to shield them from uncomfortable reality is doomed, and women need to grow the hell up and stop whining about others being more beautiful than they are.

I’m not the most beautiful woman in the world and I had and still have flaws like everyone else, but do you hear me whining about it? No, because I’m an adult. I corrected the problems I could, minimized the ones I couldn’t correct and live with the rest. I’ve known lots of whores who weren’t perfect beauties by any stretch and made up for it with wonderful personalities, but since neofeminists generally have neither looks nor personality they are driven to be dogs in the manger in the hope of ruining it for all women.

I wonder what Dines would think of how my psychologist advised me to watch porn movies, buy “how-to” sex books and also a vibrator! I bought these things and used them to help me recover from being frigid. Nothing was physically wrong with me. It was all mental/emotional. I’m very thankful my psychologist didn’t have these sick, evil views on sex like Dines does! These things also WORKED for me. They get me ready to start looking for a relationship plus sex only friendships. To be honest, I’d love to tell Dines about all this to her face. Her reactions would give me a lot to laugh about for years!

You think she’s bad? Take a look at the commentary on this blog from soi-disant “feminists” who believe other women’s bodies belong to them to control. The ones called “Geneva” and “M. Smith” are the most dogmatic.

My guess is; she doesn’t hate porn, rather it serves her hate in men. She’s here in Iceland now and will take part in a conference on porn tomorrow. She was interviewed by the national TV this evening.

Maggie on Twitter

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